PLAYWRIGHT AND POET
Karol Wojtyła’s literary work blossomed in the first dozen years of his priesthood. The war, life in a communist-dominated country, and his expanding pastoral experiences and responsibilities all became grist for his poetic and dramatic mill. By his own choice, he wrote under two pseudonyms—Andrzej Jawień (a common surname in Niegowić), and Stanisław Andrzej Gruda. He wanted, Jerzy Turowicz believed, to make a distinction between his literary work and his writing on religion, faith, morals, and Church affairs, which were always published under his own name, and he thought he had a right to have his work considered on its own merits, rather than as clerical curiosities.88
Writers write for an infinity of reasons. Wojtyła’s plays and poems were an expression of a conviction that he had formed early and that had intensified throughout his life—that reality could not be grasped by one instrument only. Even after he had become a professional philosopher, a teacher of the subject and a professorial guide for others’ philosophical work, he remained convinced that one of the weaknesses of modern intellectual life was the tendency in all disciplines to think that there was only one way to get a grip on the reality of the human condition.89 This struck Wojtyła as both arrogant and impossible. The depths of the human experience were such that they could be probed only by a host of methods. Literature—in his case, plays and poems—could sometimes get to truths that could not be adequately grasped philosophically or theologically. Like many twentieth-century philosophers, Wojtyła believed that language, either technical or literary, was always inadequate to the reality it tried to grasp and convey. Thus Wojtyła’s literary activity was not a hobby. It was another way of “being present” to the lives of others, through the writer’s natural medium of dialogue.90
Our God’s Brother
Karol Wojtyła began writing his first mature play, Our God’s Brother, at age twenty-five, during his final year in the Kraków seminary. He had long been fascinated by the life of Adam Chmielowski, “Brother Albert,” one of the most intriguing figures in modern Polish cultural and religious life, first becoming aware of him during his student days at the Jagiellonian University and during the war.91
Born in 1845 in southern Poland, Adam Chmielowski was raised by relatives after his parents’ death and spent two years at an agricultural school. At age seventeen, he joined the 1863 partisan uprising against Russian rule and was wounded in battle. His left leg was amputated below the knee in an operation performed without anaesthesia. After the uprising was suppressed, he briefly attended an art school in Warsaw and then went to Paris and Munich, where he studied painting and became an accomplished artist. He held his first exhibition in Kraków in 1870 and established a niche as a thinker about his art. Chmielowski criticized the tendency of the Polish painting of his time to focus almost exclusively on such historical themes as the nation’s battles. This “historicism,” he believed, led to a kind of nationalistic “hysteria” and rendered Polish painting incapable of being “universal.”92
In 1880, he tried to join the Jesuits but had a nervous collapse and left the novitiate after six months. Living with his brother, he continued to develop a distinctively modern style of painting and became a lay Franciscan missionary. After resettling in Kraków in 1884, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with his life as an artist. Angered by what he regarded as the municipality’s inadequate care for the poor, he became involved with helping the homeless. In August 1887, he put on a simple sackcloth habit, taking the religious name “Brother Albert.” A year later he made vows before Cardinal Albin Dunajewski, himself a former partisan. Founding the Albertine Brothers and, some years later, the Albertine Sisters, he devoted the rest of his life to the poor and homeless, while living in radical poverty. Brother Albert died on Christmas Day, 1916. Adam Stefan Sapieha was at his funeral, along with a host of clergy from throughout the city and the region, the mayor of Kraków, and people from every social stratum.93 His most famous painting, Ecce Homo (incomplete, like virtually all of his extant work), is displayed in the Albertine Convent in Kraków. Reprints of it are found in churches and homes throughout Poland.
Karol Wojtyła’s plays are not “plays” in the conventional sense of the term, and Our God’s Brother is certainly not a conventional biographical drama, although it follows the trajectory of Adam Chmielowski’s life in broad outline. An example of the Kotlarczyk-Wojtyła “inner theater,” the play is an attempt to communicate Brother Albert’s struggle to identify and live out his vocation. The play’s main “action” takes place in the conscience of Adam Chmielowski, who is “becoming” Brother Albert throughout the drama.94
The mainspring of the play’s dramatic tension is vocational—the struggle to make oneself into a gift, to abandon ego, in this case illustrated by Chmielowski’s struggle to justify his comfortable artist’s life as he wrestles with a call to radical poverty and service.95 There is another level to Our God’s Brother, though. In the play, through the struggles of Brother Albert, Wojtyła is working out for himself the problem of revolutionary violence. Having returned to a Poland now subject to a communist superpower, he found that the problem posed itself in two ways. How is one to assess the Marxist critique of contemporary industrial society? And how does one determine one’s own response to tyranny—a question that both the wartime Occupation and his circumstances in 1948–1950 had pressed on Wojtyła.
These questions are explored in Our God’s Brother through the dramatic confrontation in the play between “Adam/Brother Superior” (Chmielowski) and a character simply called the “Stranger.” There has been considerable speculation about possible models for the Stranger. Pope John Paul II has confirmed that the character is “Crypto-Lenin,” an adaptation by the playwright of the never-confirmed legend that Chmielowski and Lenin met, perhaps in Zakopane, while the latter was living in and around Kraków in 1912–1914.96
The confrontation between Adam and the Stranger is, on the surface, about tactics, the Stranger charging that the “apostles of charity,” like Chmielowski, are really the enemies of the poor. The deeper struggle between the two revolutionaries is for souls. Both men are wrestling for converts, for the allegiance of the poor and the homeless, but the ideologically besotted Stranger, who is not unattractive and certainly not unintelligent, can only see his potential disciples in categories: the lumpenproletariat, unfit for revolution; the workers, bearers of the dynamics of history; and so forth.
At the deepest level, the dramatic action in Our God’s Brother is a struggle over the meaning of freedom, and by extension the meaning of human existence. Adam, in this case voicing the playwright’s convictions, does not deny either the injustice of society or the legitimacy of the anger that injustice generates. Yet he comes to believe that the only social transformation truly worthy of the human person runs through the cross, which “transforms a man’s fall into good and his slavery into freedom.”97 The resolution of the drama is found in Brother Albert’s dying words, spoken as a worker’s insurrection has broken out in the city:
Ah well. You know that anger has to erupt, especially if it is great.
[He stops.]
And it will last, because it is just.
[He becomes even more deeply lost in thought. Then he adds one sentence, as if to himself, though everyone listens attentively.]
I know for certain, though, that I have chosen a greater freedom.98
This is not religious quietism in the face of injustice and tyranny, nor does the playwright accept that the only alternatives are acquiescence to injustice or priests with rifles. Brother Albert poses a third option: service to the poor in the transformation of culture, which will lead in time to the transformation of politics. It was a point well understood by Poland’s communist authorities, who wanted to cut the last line, about the “greater freedom,” from the script when Our God’s Brother was finally performed in Kraków in 1980.99
Some twenty-five years before the term was coined, Our God’s Brother was Karol Wojtyła�
��s first exercise in “liberation theology.” The Church, his play suggests, is the true place of freedom in the world, because the Church is a witness to the messianic liberation prophesied by Isaiah, the liberation that would truly liberate human beings in the depth of their humanity.100 Brother Albert did not defend the Church as such but defended human dignity through the Church and the truths it bore. Compared to Lenin, he did indeed choose the “greater freedom.”
Our God’s Brother is sometimes taken to exemplify Karol Wojtyła’s sympathy for certain aspects of Marxism, or at least of the Marxist critique of modern industrial society.101 This seems rather stretched. Marxism identified certain injustices of early industrial capitalism. But it was not the only biting critique of the socioeconomic status quo: Pope Leo XIII had made a strong defense of workers’ rights in the 1891 encyclical that began the tradition of modern Catholic social doctrine, Rerum Novarum. Moreover, Wojtyła flatly rejected Marxism’s concept of the human person, its understanding of the dynamics of history, and its violent strategy of social change, as Our God’s Brother makes abundantly clear. To acknowledge that the anger provoked by injustice was just because the injustice was real hardly constitutes an endorsement, however tepid, of Marxism’s analysis of the human condition. The “greater freedom” chosen by Brother Albert was a freedom that the Stranger, Crypto-Lenin, regarded as a swindle of the poor. Karol Wojtyła has never doubted that Brother Albert had it exactly right, and Crypto-Lenin exactly wrong.102
The Jeweler’s Shop
In Our God’s Brother, the playwright is working through the mystery of vocational decision by reflecting on a historic figure whose struggle paralleled his own and whose example became a model for his own priesthood.103 Writing the play was one way to repay Karol Wojtyła’s “debt of gratitude” to Brother Albert.104 The Jeweler’s Shop, a poetic meditation on the mystery of marriage, was a partial payment of Wojtyła’s debt to his Środowisko.105 At the same time, it deepened the playwright’s meditation on the human struggle to make oneself into a gift, and in doing so, to live out one’s destiny as a creature made in the image of God.
Wojtyła’s poetic skills are beautifully deployed as The Jeweler’s Shop tells the inner story of three marriages. Andrew and Teresa have only a brief life together before Andrew is a casualty of the war, leaving Teresa to raise their infant son, Christopher, alone. Stefan and Anna survive the war, but their marriage has fallen into mutual indifference, and then hostility. Stefan takes love for granted, and thus love withers. Anna, for her part, yearns for a more perfect love, and thus stifles the imperfect love she is called to bring to a greater perfection. Stefan and Anna’s difficult relationship scars their daughter, Monica, as growing up without a father has been a burden on Teresa’s son, Christopher. As they fall in love, Christopher and Monica carry with them the pain and weight of their family histories. Precisely because of that burden, they also embody the hope of redemption from the accumulated evil of the years, for both themselves and their parents.
Wojtyła’s viewpoint as playwright is that of a sympathetic and realistically discerning friend who knows marriage from the inside as much as a celibate can. When The Jeweler’s Shop was published in the December 1960 issue of Znak, with the author identified only as “A. Jawień,” readers unfamiliar with the pseudonym would not have had any reason to suspect that the playwright was a priest. They would have recognized the author as a realist, not a sentimentalist, but a realist who found hope in love, which is always stronger than mere sentimentality.
Throughout the drama, Wojtyła gently insists that love and fidelity cannot be reduced to emotions. Their only secure foundation is to be found in the human capacity to reach out and grasp the moral truth of things. A marriage is not an on-again, off-again meeting between two emotional states. Marriage is the reality of two persons who have been transformed by their meeting and their initial gift of self to the other. That transformation remains, even when the emotions that were part of the relationship’s beginning have disappeared into history.106 What is necessary is purifying our emotions and transforming them, over time, into the more solid reality of self-giving love. When Anna, thinking she has reached the end of her endurance with Stefan, tries to sell her wedding ring to the Jeweler, he takes it from her, puts it onto his scales, and then declines:
This ring does not weigh anything,
the needle does not move from zero
and I cannot make it show
even a milligram.
Your husband must be alive,
in which case neither of your rings, taken separately,
will weigh anything—only both together will register.
My jeweler’s scales have this peculiarity
that they weigh not the metal
but man’s entire being and fate.107
In focusing so intently on self-giving love as the foundation of the unbreakable bond of marriage, Wojtyła was also making a large theological claim—that marriage is the beginning of our understanding of the interior life of God, the Trinity of self-giving persons in which personhood is fulfilled in the absolute gift of self. Marriage, he suggests, is the human experience that begins to make God comprehensible to human beings.108 We are far, indeed, from a pre–Vatican II Catholic understanding of marriage as, inter alia, a “remedy” for concupiscence. The self-giving love and life-giving generativity of marriage are an icon for Wojtyła of the interior life of the trinitarian God, and of God’s interface with the world through the Incarnation of his son.
When The Jeweler’s Shop was published in Znak at Christmas, 1960, some of “A. Jawień’s” friends were startled. “We read about ourselves,” recalled Stanisław Rybicki. There were “entire sections where I heard Staszek,” remembered his wife, Danuta, who also recognized personality traits from other Rodzinka friends in the drama. A camping trip incident with the Rybickis—the cry of an owl outdoors at night, initially mistaken as a lost camper crying for help—was re-created at the beginning of the play. When Andrew subsequently asks Teresa to marry him—“Would you like to become forever my life’s companion?”—he uses a phrase, “my life’s companion,” that Wojtyła later attributed to Jerzy Ciesielski, describing his wife, Danuta. And Adam, a mysterious “chance interlocutor” whom Anna meets outside the jeweler’s shop, certainly reflects the experience of Father Karol Wojtyła, friend and confessor, who “knew exactly how we lived,” who “took part in the love between couples and between parents and their children,” and who had lived out with his companions the problems of their lives.109
As Pope John Paul II later recalled, he was reworking for dramatic purposes situations that “only those present at the time could recognize.”110 No member of Środowisko appears in the play as such, but the character of Monica (interestingly enough, the name of Halina Królikiewicz’s firstborn) was based on someone whom the playwright had known personally.111 Wojtyła had the uncanny ability to remember entire conversations decades after they had happened. He put this capacity to good use in The Jeweler’s Shop, giving its poetic monologues the ring of truth.112 In adapting his experiences with his friends and his penitents, Karol Wojtyła was not simply ransacking his remarkable memory for dramatic material, however. He was making an important point, ultimately theological in import, about his friends and the lives they were living: your lives, which seem like so many other lives, are in fact caught up in a great drama of sin and redemption. In that drama, human love will yield to “the pressure of reality” and crumble unless it is completed and perfected in being conformed to a Love that is capable of fulfilling love’s longing for absolute fulfillment. The human drama “plays,” as it were, within the divine drama, a play of which God himself is both author and protagonist, creator and redeemer.113
Poetry
During these early years of his priesthood, Karol Wojtyła discovered that the scientific apparatus of philosophy could limit, even impede, the exploration of human experience. Literature, in crucial respects, was a more supple instrumen
t for delving into the hidden depths of the human condition. Thus Wojtyła would urge his colleague at the Catholic University of Lublin, Stefan Sawicki, to read carefully in the “dark literature” of modernity, such as Camus’s The Plague or Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.114 Like his plays, Wojtyła’s poetry is a way of “being present” to others in a conversation about the truth of things.
It is not easy poetry, in the original or in translation.115 Yet his poems display the “voice” of Karol Wojtyła in a privileged way, particularly his insight into human relationships, the struggles of the individual conscience, and the mystical experience.116 Written in a telegraphic, sometimes elliptical style, the poems oscillate between extreme concreteness and abstraction. They also display a striking capacity to get “inside” the experience and conscience of another—a worker in a modern munitions factory, for example:
I cannot influence the fate of the globe, I do not begin wars.
Am I working with You or against You—I do not know.
I don’t sin.
And it worries me that I have no influence and that I don’t sin…
I am preparing the fragments of disaster
but I do not catch a wholeness, the fate of man is above my imagination…
But is that enough?117
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